Adventure seed: Dude, Where’s My Tree?

Blame this.

dude-wheres-my-tree_-google-docs

Dude, Where’s my Tree?

So, the party gets a knock on the door of their office one evening – what, they don’t have an office?  If you’re running a modern supernatural/occult fixer game the party has to have an office. It’s practically de rigeur.  Otherwise, how is anybody supposed to find them in order to hire them, threaten them, or collapse in a dying heap on the floor while croaking out one last cryptic warning?

Right.  Knock on the door: and it’s the classic ‘skeleton in a trenchcoat and a fedora’ situation. Well, almost: complicating matters is that the skeleton doesn’t understand English. Fortunately, the skeleton does speak (somehow) the medieval forms of both Irish Gaelic and Latin, and presumably somebody in the party speaks at least one of those, so from there the actual job can be described.

As for the job?  Well, it’s like this. The skeleton got himself murdered about a thousand years or so ago, and was peacefully and indeed happily moldering in his shallow grave for that entire time.  No, really.  None of this ‘seek out vengeance from beyond the grave’ stuff for it; to be completely honest about it, the skeleton totally had it coming.  Heck, it was only technically ‘murder’ because the other guy was faster with the backstab.

Anyway… moldering quietly in the grave, chilling out, enjoying the tree that grew up over his grave, contentedly feeling the tree burrow its roots about his bones, then whammo!  The tree goes base over branches in a storm, and yanks him up to the surface in the process.  And then the damned archeologists got ahold of him, and that’s when things went pear-shaped.

The problem is that he is technically a murder victim, and it is technically true that folklore has a few examples of murders coming to light when a tree is uprooted or whatnot.  That means that there’s a dangerously powerful mythic ground charge building up, and it’s going to have to be discharged somehow.  The easiest way for that to work is to activate the aforementioned ‘seek out vengeance from beyond the grave’ scenario – only it’s been a thousand years, so the skeleton would have to go after his murderer’s descendants and the skeleton does not want to do that.  It’d be mean. And rude. And, frankly, time-consuming.

Really, all the skeleton wants to do is go back to happily moldering away entwined in the roots of a tree.  But he just can’t figure out how to do that.  Fortunately, he ran into this guy in a bar who said that the party was good at handling situations like these…